Written by Yian Chen
Image credit: Main Visual for Formosa Orchids Blossom-Taipei Edition, NMH, 2025. Provided by the author.
Orchids have long been familiar in Taiwan. As a child, I watched my grandparents grow them in their rooftop garden, and the hanging pots of colourful blossoms on our terrace remain among my most vivid memories of visiting the countryside. In Taiwan, these flowers appear not only in domestic gardens but also in shops, restaurants, ceremonies, public events, natural landscapes and artistic creations. They can be found in mountains, plains, and watersides, where enthusiasts continue to seek and identify their many genera and species. In these settings, orchids are not confined to a single cultural framework. They exist simultaneously within the realms of literati aesthetics, botanical science, Aboriginal ritual practice, and colonial history. Their meanings have been continually reshaped across historical periods, political regimes, and systems of knowledge.
It was precisely this layered cultural history that the Formosa Orchids Blossom (臺灣蘭花百姿) exhibition at the National Museum of History (NMH) sought to explore. Emerging from a partnership between the NMH and INTERMEDIATHEQUE, the University Museum of the University of Tokyo (UMUT), the project took shape as a paired exhibition held in Tokyo and Taipei in 2025. Rather than presenting a single narrative of orchids in Taiwan, the two exhibitions approached orchids through their different institutional histories and collection strengths. The Tokyo exhibition foregrounded UMUT’s botanical specimens, scientific records, and botanical paintings while also incorporating digital presentations of orchid paintings from the NMH collection. The Taipei exhibition, developed collaboratively by the NMH and UMUT, expanded this narrative through the NMH’s orchid-related paintings, UMUT’s botanical archives, and historical materials, as well as paintings, photographs, and cultural objects from other institutions in Taiwan.
Within the exhibition narrative, orchids appeared as literary and artistic symbols, ritual objects, scientific specimens, markers of emerging Taiwanese identity in the colonial period, and signs of cultural transformation in postwar Taiwan, allowing the exhibition to bring often-marginalised Aboriginal and colonial histories into dialogue with the NMH collection.
Image credit: Installation view of “Botanical Paintings of Taiwanese Orchids by Yamada Toshio,” Formosa Orchids Blossom—Taipei Edition, NMH, 2025.
The NMH Collection of Orchids
Taiwan’s modern museum landscape reflects the island’s complex history of indigeneity, settlement, and ruling regime change. Successive political and cultural formations—shaped by maritime trade, Qing imperial governance, Japanese colonialism, and postwar KMT authoritarianism—provided a richly layered context for understanding how public institutions constructed their collections and narratives in the period following Taiwan’s democratisation. The National Museum of History, established in 1955 by the postwar Republic of China government, originally functioned as one of the state’s most important cultural institutions. Its extensive collection of postwar calligraphy and ink-wash paintings closely reflects official narratives of Chinese cultural continuity. However, Taiwan’s democratisation from the late 1980s onwards fundamentally transformed public expectations of museums and cultural identity. Institutions that once promoted singular national narratives increasingly faced demands to address previously suppressed colonial experiences and marginalised Aboriginal perspectives.
In this context, the NMH’s collaboration with UMUT offered a way to reconsider the museum’s orchid-related collections through a broader, transnational and interdisciplinary framework. Orchids in the museum’s ink-wash painting collection have long been appreciated as adaptations of Chinese literati aesthetics in Taiwan, while a smaller group of works adopted sketch-based techniques to represent Phalaenopsis and Cattleya orchids with greater botanical specificity. To account for these divergent modes of orchid representation, the exhibition situated the works within a wider history of Taiwan, bringing ink-wash paintings into dialogue with botanical specimens, colonial archives, ethnographic photography and Aboriginal cultural materials.
Image credit: Chang Dai-chien (張大千), Orchids (墨蘭), ink on paper, NMH 75-03595.
Image credit: Wu Yung-hsiang (吳詠香), Two Orchids in Rival Splendour (雙蘭競秀), colour on silk, NMH 87-00447.
Indigenising Orchid Culture in Taiwan
Beyond the dominant Chinese literati aesthetics of the NMH collection, Aboriginal relationships with orchids reveal a much longer, living cultural history predating both colonial science and postwar museum narratives in Taiwan. The island’s Aboriginal peoples have long maintained ecological knowledge and cultural systems shaped by sustained interactions with the natural environment. Among these relationships is the Tsou people’s connection to a native Dendrobium orchid known in the Tsou language as Fiteu, which plays an indispensable role in the Mayasvi (the War Festival). The plant first entered botanical and ethnographic records when Japanese botanists and anthropologists conducted fieldwork in Taiwan’s mountainous regions.
To make this history visible, a postwar ethnographic photograph in the NMH collection, Tsou Warrior, served as an entry point for introducing Tsou Fiteu cosmology. Taken by Chang Tsai, a pioneer of documentary photography educated during the Japanese colonial era, the photograph connected the museum’s postwar visual collection to longer histories of botanical and ethnographic documentation and to Aboriginal cultural practice. Paired with botanical specimens, field notes, and photographs from the UMUT collection, along with a present-day documentary on Fiteu in the Mayasvi ritual, the exhibition told the story of the Tsou people’s relationship with Fiteu. In Tsou culture, Fiteu is believed to possess the power to cleanse, ward off evil spirits, and connect warriors with the god of war during Mayasvi. Today, the Tsou continue to hold Mayasvi annually on their ancestral lands in Alishan, where warriors gather the plant to adorn their ceremonial attire and ritual spaces. In this context, the orchid serves as a sacred symbol of spiritual identity, social belonging, and the relationship between humans and deities.
Image credit: Chang Tsai (張才), Tsou Warrior (鄒族勇士), 1949, gelatin silver print, NMH 93-00324.
The section on the Tsou and Fiteu emphasised that orchids in Taiwan cannot be understood solely through scientific taxonomy or aesthetic appreciation. Aboriginal relationships with orchids reveal cultural histories that both precede and extend beyond colonial and postwar institutional frameworks. By placing ethnographic photographs, botanical specimens, and fine art objects from museums across different countries, languages, and cultures into dialogue, the exhibition repositioned Fiteu as a key reference point for contextualising Taiwan’s orchid imagery. This revealed the orchid as an image shaped by the environmental and cultural histories accumulated by different peoples, cultures, and regimes on the island. This image can be better understood through interdisciplinary collaboration beyond rigid institutional divisions.
Image credit: Installation view of “Ethnobotany and the Tsou’s Secret Plant Fiteu,” Formosa Orchids Blossom—Taipei Edition, NMH, 2025.
Image credit: Installation view of Fiteu, video installation, Formosa Orchids Blossom—Taipei Edition, NMH, 2025.
Interdisciplinary Collaboration as Museum Practice
Central to the exhibition’s framework was a deeply interdisciplinary and international methodology. This interdisciplinary collaboration united curators, botanists, historians, anthropologists, artists, and archivists from prominent institutions across Japan, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom, seamlessly integrating resources from university libraries, herbaria, botanical gardens, and research centres with those from art and history museums. Botanical specimens are usually associated with science museums, paintings with art museums, and archival documentation with university collections. However, historical experiences rarely conform to these institutional divisions. The exhibition challenged such boundaries by treating orchids not as objects contained within a single disciplinary category but as cultural forms whose meanings shift across different historical systems.
In this sense, the interdisciplinary framework of Formosa Orchids Blossom functioned not merely as an aesthetic choice but also as a means of generating new perspectives. The orchids of Taiwan can be understood through the lenses of ecology, colonial science, Aboriginal knowledge systems, artistic production, commercial cultivation, and identity formation. For the NMH, whose holdings still bear the imprint of Taiwan’s authoritarian cultural narratives, this approach offered a way to interpret the collection beyond the framework in which many of its objects were originally formed. The collaboration between UMUT and NMH enabled each institution’s collection to illuminate the gaps in the other: UMUT’s botanical archives documented the history of Japanese exploration in Taiwan, while NMH’s collections reflected postwar artistic and cultural developments rooted in the island’s earlier historical layers.
The collaboration also shifted the NMH’s role from a site of authoritative narration to one of dialogue with the public. Rather than presenting a single linear history, the exhibition foregrounded the intersections, contradictions, and multiple perspectives. This approach resonates with broader debates in museum studies about decolonisation and shared authority. Although Formosa Orchids Blossom does not fully resolve these issues, it demonstrates how collaborative and interdisciplinary practices can open and deepen historical interpretation, even in museums burdened by authoritarian institutional histories.
Toward Transnational Museum Dialogue
Formosa Orchids Blossom points to a model of transnational museum dialogue grounded in both comparison and accountability. Through a collaboration between the National Museum of History (NMH) and the University Museum of the University of Tokyo (UMUT), the exhibition demonstrated how cross-border curatorial work can move beyond exchanging objects or accumulating institutional prestige to reinterpret collections outside their original ideologies. Rather than producing a unified narrative of orchids in Taiwan, the project revealed the limits of any single museum, discipline, or national history in accounting for an object’s cultural life. The differences between the two institutions—their missions, colonial and postwar inheritances, and collecting histories—became central to the exhibition’s intellectual structure, allowing it to address historical questions that neither could have articulated independently.
In this project, orchids functioned as a shared object of inquiry through which multiple histories were brought into relation. UMUT’s botanical specimens, illustrations, field records, and colonial-era research materials introduced the legacies of Japanese botanical taxonomy, ethnographic documentation, and the imperial structures that enabled them. In contrast, the NMH collection made visible the postwar artistic framing of orchids through Chinese literati traditions and Taiwanese ink-wash painting. In these works, calligraphic brushstrokes evoke the posture of orchid leaves, while specific orchid species, whose presence in Taiwanese society grew during the Japanese colonial period, add a complex visual layer to a genre otherwise shaped by a dominant Sinocentric narrative. The inclusion of Fiteu further prevented the exhibition from being confined to a binary dialogue between colonial science and postwar art history.
Ultimately, the exhibition points to a model of transnational dialogue grounded in both comparison and accountability. Such a model does not erase differences or resolve the asymmetries produced by colonialism, nationalism, or disciplinary authority; instead, it makes these asymmetries visible and turns them into the basis for a more layered form of interpretation. By tracing orchids across these shifting institutional and cultural realms, Formosa Orchids Blossom reframed Taiwanese orchid culture not as a fixed heritage category, but as a dynamic historical field shaped by encounter, classification, ritual, cultivation, and memory.
Image credit: Exhibition catalogue of Formosa Orchids Blossom, NMH, and UMUT, 2025.
Yian Chen is a PhD candidate in the ITASIA Program at the University of Tokyo and a lecturer-level research assistant at Taiwan’s National Museum of History. Born and raised in Taiwan, she holds a master’s degree in Museum Education from the George Washington University. Her doctoral research examines cultural representation in museum collections and its historical formation in relation to Taiwan’s processes of decolonisation and democratisation.
This article was published as part of the special issue on Polyphonic Curation: Museum Exhibitions and Indigenous Dialogue.